Authors: Bill Barich
San Diego was Ray Kroc’s hometown, a McDonald’s kind of town. It was a paradise without affect, thick with Republican virtues. You could count on having a good time in the city, I thought, but you’d never have a great one. The first few days I was around, I kept pinching myself to be sure that I was still alive. Purgatory could be like San Diego, really, with each moment and each day repeating the one before it, and nothing ever changing.
On the downtown streets, I saw so many blond, well-groomed, conservatively dressed men and women that I became convinced there must be a convention of former quarterbacks and cheerleaders going on somewhere. They had the high spirits of students who’d passed a tricky geometry exam and had just been told they would not have to miss the prom, after all. So much blondness, so much sun-washed light—I felt as though I were being tugged kicking and screaming into the pages of
Sunset
.
San Diego was for the young in spirit and the young at heart. The median age in the city was 28.7, and everything seemed half-formed and still tinged with a blush of adolescence. People were
clinging to their naïveté and keeping at least ten yards between themselves and any serious information.
San Diegans might not be bookish or intellectual, but they were religious in their way and all worshiped at the First Church of Recreation, conducting their devotionals on 78 golf links and 1,200 tennis courts, in countless parks and fitness centers, and aboard 50,000 boats. They had to work, yes, but they did it reluctantly. The prevailing fantasy was to become a successful entrepreneur, not for the money but for the time it would buy you, more time to recreate. About three-quarters of the city’s businesses were small and independent and had fewer than ten employees.
The economy of San Diego had once been pegged to agriculture and the U.S. Navy, but now manufacturing and tourism were equally important. The big fortunes were still being earned in real estate, on subdivisions, and on strip malls. The hills around town had all been shaved and leveled for new construction—“condo-farming,” the practice was called.
Not every San Diegan was in favor of growth. A vocal minority objected strongly to the tracts and the condos and complained that San Diego was spreading too fast and without proper planning. The city lagged far behind its needs in building schools, roads, and firehouses. Its budget was stretched paper-thin, and its suburbs were an eyesore sprawl.
So what else is new in California? I asked myself.
Some alarmists subscribed to a hellish scenario whereby San Diego would blend gradually into Los Angeles to form a monster megalopolis. They yanked at their hair and cried that the distance between the cities was slowly being eroded, mourning the loss as they might a closing of the gap between sanity and madness.
Only Camp Pendleton, a training camp for the U.S. Marines, stood in the path of developers, commanding the terrain that separated San Diegans from their threatening neighbors.
Jokes about how to keep Angelenos and Los Angeles away were rampant in the city. One writer had suggested setting up a checkpoint
where guards would search cars for such L.A.-style contraband as Evian water, self-hypnosis tapes, and cellular phones. The guards would also ferret out interlopers by asking questions like, “What’s the difference between a treatment and a screenplay? Between a screenplay and a novelization?”—questions that no self-respecting San Diegan would be able to answer.
While a few San Diegans were trying to shut the gate behind them, many others were kicking it open again. The Convention and Visitors Bureau was even advertising the merits of the city over the radio in Los Angeles. In one commercial, a man and a woman stalled in a traffic jam were heard talking about what they did to stay calm. They both closed their eyes and thought about moving to San Diego.
S
AN DIEGO MIGHT BE THE LAST PARADISE
in California, but it was a paradise under siege. While Los Angeles was pinching it from the north, Mexico was pinching it from the south. Thousands of Mexicans—and Central and South Americans—crossed the border every day, some of them legal and some of them not, and made the city their first stop and often never left.
Immigrant women gave birth at public hospitals, families went on welfare, and children were educated in public schools, and the taxpayers in San Diego County had to pick up the tab. They did not pick it up with enthusiasm.
San Diegans, although closer to the border, were not unlike other Californians in their schizophrenic attitude toward Mexico. They wanted the shoppers and the laborers and the bargain-priced goods manufactured in
maquilas
, but they didn’t want Mexicans to stay in their city. All the maids and the gardeners, the pourers of concrete, they should go back home on the evening trolley.
Irma Castro ran the Chicano Federation out of an older house in Barrio Sherman in San Diego. She had the same sort of coffee cups and furniture that Alejandro Montenegro had up in San Rafael. She was a fiery, dynamic woman who cared deeply about the rights
of Latinos and the federation’s mission to attend to them and see that every person got their due. Almost all the clients of the agency came from low-income families and lacked the language skills to cope with the forms and the offices of government, even when they were legal residents of the state.
In many respects, Irma Castro told me when I visited her, San Diego was just as segregated as Los Angeles. Hispanics lived in
barrios
in the inner city and in the towns south of Interstate 8 that rolled toward the border. National City, Chula Vista, and San Ysidro were gritty and prone to drugs, gang life, and crime.
The next generation of Hispanic children might not be much better off than their predecessors, Irma Castro felt. The elementary schools in the
barrio
were designed to hold about six hundred kids, but they took in twice that many. The buildings were old and the playgrounds were dirt. The San Diego School Board had one black person on it, but there were no Latinos, even though they made up about a quarter of the city’s residents.
“The leadership here thinks this is the Midwest,” Irma Castro said. “They reject the whole notion of diversity.”
San Diego had never welcomed immigrant Hispanics with open arms, she explained, and that was still true, except that the situation had gotten more complicated. Sometimes legal Hispanics were as hard on the new arrivals from Mexico as white people were. They thought that the newcomers reflected badly on them, that they were lumped together with them in the public mind and forced to pay for their mistakes.
In the past, it had been almost impossible to make any progress in the city, Irma Castro said, because of blatantly dirty politics. Among the recent triumphs of the Chicano Federation was the role it had played in forging an important settlement agreement with San Diego that would help to change that.
The federation had joined in a class-action suit,
Perez
v.
City of San Diego
, that had taken issue with the way that districts were gerrymandered for electoral purposes. Because of the gerrymandering,
no Hispanic had ever been elected outright to the city council. Furthermore, no nonincumbent black had ever defeated a nonminority candidate.
After lots of litigation and arbitration, the class plaintiffs and the defendant, San Diego, had reached a compromise agreement. It admitted that the political structure of the city was a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and had denied minorities fair representation. The settlement agreement ordered a redistricting that would allow minority candidates an equal chance to be elected.
I had always heard that San Diego was not a good town to get caught in if you were a Mexican, but I still found it hard to believe that no Latino had ever been elected to the city council. Irma Castro assured me that it was so, but she added that one Latino had been appointed, Jess Haro, who chaired the federation’s board of directors.
“You should talk to him,” she said, and grabbed a phone and arranged a meeting for the next morning.
J
ESS HARO WAS A STRAPPING
, strong-featured, opinionated man who looked every bit the former U.S. Marine. He met me for breakfast at the Hob Nob, a downtown restaurant that catered to government workers, where the waitresses knew everybody by name and the people occupying the booths spoke in whispers about the impending affairs of state.
Haro’s parents had come to the United States from Jalisco, Mexico, in 1910. His father started as a farmworker in Texas and later moved the family to California and took a job with Columbia Steel in Pittsburg, in Contra Costa County. He and his wife had nine children, and Jess was the youngest of them.
After graduating from high school, Jess Haro had attended Stockton Junior College and Sacramento State, studying economics and foreign languages. He’d had an attitude back then, a chip on his shoulder.
“As a young man, I thought I was smarter than anybody else,”
he said, amused by the notion and what time had done to it. “I might show up late for an appointment, and if you called me on it, I’d just tell you to go fuck yourself.”
From college, he went on to join the marines and became a pilot, and when he returned home, a friend from the corps hired him to work for a brokerage firm in San Diego, but the job wasn’t to his liking.
“It was so superficial,” Haro said, waving a hand in dismissal. “I was always touting clients on stuff I didn’t know a thing about. I couldn’t even read a financial statement. We were just selling intangibles. Truly, I learned nothing in two years.”
So he left the brokerage firm and went to work as a lumber salesman for Georgia-Pacific, but he ran into trouble with his boss, believing that the man had it in for him and resented Haro’s success and the good time that he was having. One day, on the spur of the moment, he quit, although he had no idea how he would pay his rent. He began buying and selling lumber on his own, managing to stay afloat by turning around a load of mahogany, say, in twenty-four hours.
“It can be better to do things out of ignorance sometimes,” he said. “You can be too analytical, you know?”
Now Haro owned a big lumber and building materials company in the city. He did a lot of business in Mexico, about fifteen percent of his gross. Mexicans knew that it was wise to trade with Californians, he told me, and to keep relations cordial, but most Californians had yet to learn that lesson.
When a vacant seat opened on the city council 1975, one of his buddies from the marine corps urged him to try to get himself appointed. This friend and others like him did not approve of the choice that Pete Wilson, who was the mayor then, had put forth. Haro rose to the challenge. He still had the presence of a person who was born to such things, stubborn and a little hotheaded and not easily dissuaded from reaching a goal.
He won the appointment handily and served for almost four
years. The coalition that picked him looked at his credentials as a businessman and assumed quite wrongly that they were acquiring another conservative member.
“It’s funny how life works out,” he reflected, sipping his coffee, “how you get from here to there. If I think back, I can see that I always had a social conscience. My dad was a union man and a Democrat before me. With my background, what else
could
I be?”
Haro had always felt that politics in San Diego were discriminatory, and his time in office confirmed it for him. He saw the greased wheels turning. The local papers, for example, never had a bad word to say about Pete Wilson. As for minorities, they were always outside the process of ascension. They had no sense of continuity in government and so had no connections and no patronage.
In Haro’s opinion, successful Latinos were partly to blame. They made their money and moved away to the suburbs instead of pumping something back into the community.
“What’s the future going to be like?” I asked him. “What effect will the settlement agreement have?”
Real political power for Hispanics was at least a decade away, he thought. They needed to produce candidates who were not simply identified with ethnic issues, candidates who could addresss a much broader constituency.
“The whole thing is about hope,” Haro said, with intensity. “If you give me some hope, I’ll bust my ass for you. I’m not impatient because we’re not in the top positions. I’m impatient because we’re not in the
bottom
positions. The pyramid is not being built.” He paused for a minute. “With all the immigrant-bashing that’s going on, every Hispanic politician has to stand up. The debate is just not rational.”
When the waitress brought our check, I mentioned to Haro that I would soon be in Mexico, my journey ended at last, and his entire demeanor changed. His jaw no longer seemed so set, and the discipline and the intensity dropped away. He looked as though he were
ready to jump in the car and go with me. He had some happy memories, all right.
He took my pen and wrote in my notebook “Hotel El Rosa,” where the swimming pool was spectacular. He wrote “Rey Sol,” where the French food was exquisite. He wrote “Puerto Nuevo,” a little town known for serving lobster. You wrapped the lobster in a tortilla with some beans, some rice, and some salsa.
“You wait until you get in that swimming pool,” Haro said, with a big grin, all thoughts of politics fled. “You’ll never want to get out.”
U
P THE COAST
in San Diego County, in Carlsbad, some Mixtec Indians from Oaxaca were camped in a dry streambed, below the strawberry fields where they worked. Roberto Martinez took me there to meet them. He was the regional director of American Friends Service Committee in San Diego and kept a record of the abuses that were heaped on migrant laborers.
Martinez was a chunky man who complained about being desk-bound. He preferred to be out in the open air. He drove north on Interstate 5 along the curve of the ocean. On every leveled ridge, in all directions, a monotony of newer subdivisions, Quail Ridge and Huntington Gate and Senterra Elite, looked out toward the Gulf of Santa Catalina.